Small Stones

I decided yesterday to take part in the Small Stones challenge for January. You can read more about the idea here, but basically the challenge is to notice something and create a brief piece of writing that captures that moment of noticing, for each day in January. It's a way of being present and aware in our worlds, during a time of year in which I am inclined to hibernate in my apartment and bury myself in my faux fur-trimmed coat when I venture out. It's also a nice, low-pressure way to making myself writing something every day.

I'm doing mine on Twitter, as are many other people, using the hashtag #smallstone. I've also decided to tag a lot of mine #OTE (for Olde Towne East - my new neighborhood - which I'm still in the process of figuring out). If you want to follow me on Twitter, for this reason or any other, you can find me @emandermay. I like the Twitter form because it ensures brevity, but I'm setting my posts up with line breaks so I can add on to them later.

Anyway, enough explanation. Here are my first two small stones:

January 1st:

At 6am the new year
hangs quiet and soft,
last year's rain glimmering
like last night's sequins.

January 2nd:

The year's first snow
sifts down
light and tiny as sugar crystals
lining the roof's shingles
the alley's bricks.

I probably won't post all of them here since I'm doing them on Twitter. Now, back to the lesson planning. Classes start tomorrow.

A Delicious Start to the New Year

Rather than any sort of in-depth reflection on the year that was or an overly-ambitious list of resolutions for the coming year, I’ve decided to post today about my favorite New Year’s Day tradition. For many people of certain cultural backgrounds, pork and sauerkraut is the traditional meal on January 1^st. My mother always made it, and I don’t remember if I ever liked it; but I don’t want to talk about pork and sauerkraut. Instead, I want to talk about Chinese food.

Yes, I said Chinese food. That’s my traditional New Year’s Day meal. It is, I think, the first holiday tradition I chose to follow as an adult, and one I’ve kept every year since January 2000.

For the infamous Y2K celebration, I was a senior in college. I was of course home for winter break but had decided to spend New Year’s Eve with friends in Columbus (this was a few years before I moved here myself). I have a very clear memory of eating a pre-party dinner at the Blue Danube (a dive bar around North Campus) and joking about how the world wasn’t ending as we watched the tvs above the bar show New Year’s celebrations in Europe where it was already the year 2000. We went to a party, or parties, and the world didn’t end in Ohio either.

The next day, New Year’s Day, my friend Laurynn and I woke up late and decided to go in search of lunch. We walked from her dingy campus area apartment on 11^th Avenue—this was before the Gateway cleaned up South Campus—and set off up High Street thinking we’d have lots of options. Unfortunately, nothing was open because of the holiday. It was bitterly cold, or we were underdressed; I don’t remember which, just that we were freezing and hungry and a bit hungover (we were 21, give us a break). We walked all the way up to Woodruff and finally found a restaurant that was open: the decidedly unglamorous No. 1 Chinese. It is exactly what one might imagine from the name, and exactly like many other hole-in-the-wall greasy cheap Chinese joints. However, that day it was delicious! It was warm inside, and the spicy salty greasy stir-fry and the mountains of rice were the perfect antidote to all of the previous night’s beer.

I had Broccoli with Garlic Sauce, I think, or maybe Szechuan Broccoli. I remember the leftovers sitting in my car taunting me as I drove home that afternoon, the burgundy Grand Am I drove in those days smelling of soy sauce and garlic and chili oil. I ate them for dinner that evening, while my parents and siblings ate pork and sauerkraut.

While I probably could, if I tried hard enough, remember where I ate every New Year’s Day Chinese meal since then, I won’t bother. I know that I’ve eaten them with friends, roommates, partners, with my sister I think, and by myself. Some have been delicious (three years ago, my girlfriend at the time and I ate at Yau’s Chinese Bistro, just down the street from Laurynn’s old apartment, and one of my favorite Chinese spots in Columbus), some have been disappointing (a friend and I ended up getting Mark Pi’s one year), but at this point, it’s the tradition that counts.

So today, after a productive day of taking down Christmas decorations, cleaning up, going for a run, and relaxing, I drove up to Fortune Chinese Restaurant and I got Eggplant with Garlic Sauce and some Hot and Sour Soup, and I came home to my windy attic apartment, and I opened up a nice pale ale, and I thoroughly enjoyed my meal. It was spicy and well-cooked and filling, but even more satisfying is the knowledge that I have this tradition that’s all my own, and that I’ve kept it for twelve years now, no matter where I was living, and that I can share it with others without losing it myself.

After Long Silence

It's been a very long time since I've posted here, and that's okay.

I won't apologize for it.

We're approaching the New Year, and I am in a very good place to be starting over. I graduated with my MFA in May, stayed in Pennsylvania over the summer and taught one last class at Penn State, then moved back to Columbus in August. I am currently teaching as an adjunct instructor at a community college and doing some freelance proofreading. I stayed with friends for awhile but moved into a lovely, quirky apartment in Olde Towne East in November. I am also recently single, after attempting to get out of the relationship last spring and then falling back into it for awhile. In a way, it feels like I'm only now able to really start my life post-MFA.

Seeing as how I haven't posted lately

perhaps I should take advantage of the fact that it's a holiday weekend and I have some downtime by posting something.

And yet... I'm having mixed feelings about even leaving this blog up, let alone continuing to post to it. And I don't have any idea what to say that might be interesting. The semester is going very well - busy, stressful, exhausting, etc, but good. And I've very much enjoyed having the week off to just chill out and get work done without other obligations. And I'm even more looking forward to winter break. But... I have no idea what I'm doing after May, nor what I want to do. There are so many variables, and for every option I think of, there are pros and cons.

So, instead of any sort of long, angsty, rambling about those decisions, or boring rambling about school, how about a list of some random things for which I'm thankful? It seems appropriate, given the time of year.

So, in no particular order, ten things I'm thankful for:
1. The cat curled up in my lap right now. She drives me nuts sometimes, but I still think she's the cutest thing on the planet, which balances out my ridiculous dog, for whom I'm also thankful.
2. The person for whom I cooked dinner yesterday.
3. The people I didn't eat dinner with yesterday - the friends and the family.
4. A very clean, festively-decorated apartment with no roommate for a couple days.
5. The fact that it hasn't snowed yet.
6. The new boots and the nice warm coat that I have for when it does snow.
7. My poetry workshop, and my Shakespeare class, and my eighteen undergraduate creative writing students.
8. The chance to be in an MFA program, to change direction in my 30s and try to do what I wanted to do all along.
9. The fabulous, beautiful, amazing life I left behind to come here, even though I miss it with a palpable ache some days, like today, when I put up my holiday decorations. I'm thankful that I had a life good enough to miss, that this weird place I am now is not the best place I've ever been.
10. Everything I have and everything I don't, the combination of gratefulness for what is and desire to make things better.

Back to School

Year Two of my MFA program at Penn State started today. Poetry workshop bright and early at 9:05 Monday morning. We didn’t actually workshop today, but we discussed our ideas and goals in terms of “voice” (the general theme of the workshop this semester), we each read a poem we’d written over the summer, and we discussed the reading we’d done for today (selections from Frank Bidart’s collected poems). It’s a nice group of people, and the vibe is very positive. ‘Twas a perfect way to begin the semester!

I’m undecided right now on the other class I’ll be taking this semester. Since this is a two year program now, and I’ll be working on my thesis, I’m registered for thesis credits which means I only need two “real” classes. Right now I’m registered for both a lit seminar on Shakespearean tragedies and a lit course on the 1930s which promises to be heavily political/cultural studies-ish. I’m masochistically considering staying in both of them, but I think I’ll end up dropping one.

I’m teaching an Intro to Creative Writing class, which I’m thrilled about. We meet for the first time tomorrow at 8:00am. I won’t reiterate all my plans here, but it’s basically a mixture of instruction and practice in fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction (i.e. lecture/discussion, lots of writing exercises, one workshop per genre). We’re using this textbook as well as supplemental readings I’ve drawn from classes I’ve taken and generally just other work I like; I’m sort of nervous about teaching work I love because I’ve heard other people say that they feel personally affronted when their students don’t like, or don’t get, some of their favorite literature. We’ll see how it goes, I guess. In general though, I’m excited about the class!

What else? Oh yeah, that whole thesis thing…. It is so strange to me that a year ago I hadn’t even begun my MFA program, and now I am halfway finished. While it would be nice to have a third year, I think the two year program is for the best (I don’t think I could take another year in Central Pennsylvania without serious detriment to my sanity). It’s crazy to think about having a book manuscript done by May, but it’s exciting as well. I turned in about 35 pages of poems to my thesis advisor at the end of spring semester, got her comments back over the summer, and then proceeded to not write very much at all…. In my defense, I did a lot of reading, and I did do some writing; but I traveled a fair amount (spent two wonderful weeks in California – half in San Francisco and half in Berkeley – and also spent a couple of long weekends back in Columbus), I also taught a summer class, and I took an intensive Spanish class, so for six weeks I was on campus eight hours a day, five days a week. Not too conducive to getting a lot of writing done. However, I feel like I have a solid idea for my manuscript and good direction for the revisions on what I’ve already given my advisor so I only need another 15 pages or so. Totally doable, right?

Overall, I’m a lot more comfortable here than I was a year ago, more confident of being able to be a successful grad student, but also feeling an increased pressure to “perform” outside of my classes, i.e. publish, get into a PhD program, get a job, or something.

And I still miss my Columbus people/my Columbus life to a ridiculous extent sometimes, in spite of the fact that I have wonderful friends here and an amazing partner I never expected to meet. Sigh! Anyway, who wants a poem? Yes? Someone out there said yes? Well, okay, here is a very early draft of something I wrote after coming back from California…..

Leaving San Francisco at Night

How many lights make up the body

of this place, it straight lines, its curves

tiny houses sprinkled like freckles

on the red-earth skin?

I entered in daylight, over water,

through clouds, struck by nothing

so much as fear of the bay

drawing closer and larger, green

and mottled, dotted with toy boats.

Since then I’ve walked the skeleton

of the city, miles and miles, hand

to hand at ground level, climbed to the top

and looked down from the tower,

but it’s only here in darkness, blinking

goodbye, that I see it as whole.

Two more things

My students are blogging this summer too. I do weekly journals during the school year, but because the summer session is so squeezed in terms of time, I decided to do a blog instead. It also saves paper, and that's a good thing as well. They've done some good stuff here if you want to take a look. Some lazy stuff too, but mostly good :)

And I encourage you to check out Poets for Living Waters, an online collection of poetry motivated by the Gulf oil spill. There is some lovely stuff there, for example these two poems by Sarah Green. I just sent them two poems as well, and would encourage my poet friends to do the same.

After a long absence...

I am finally posting on my blog again.

My summer has passed through a few distinct phases, which I'll try to summarize, and it is now winding to a close. A month from now, fall semester will have already begun.

Phase 1 was the one in which I last posted. I read a lot, relaxed a lot, hung out with friends, wrote, and ran.

Phase 2 was two glorious weeks away from this town. I spent ten days in California and didn't want to leave, then spent a long weekend in Columbus before returning to PA. San Francisco was fabulous, and Berkeley was beautiful, and M and I had a wonderful time. Columbus was also an excellent time in which I ate a lot of good food and hung out with a lot of old friends.

Phase 3 was rather unpleasant and unhappy, in that I had to adjust to being back here and get ready to teach class. I also decided in that time period to take Spanish this summer so there were logistics to be worked out with that. And I started thinking more about what to do after the MFA; my conclusion, subject to change as always, is that I'm going to apply to just a couple of PhD programs in creative writing, as well as apply for other types of things as well. Hence me taking Spanish; most of the PhD programs require a foreign language competency. Phase 3 ended with my pilgrimage to Comfest back in Columbus. A wonderful hot weekend and another which I did not want to leave.

Phase 4 began on June 30th when I started teaching and on July 1st when I started my Spanish class. What I've been doing since then is getting up at 6:00am every day (M-F), catching the bus at 7:30, spending 8:00-12:25 in Spanish class (it's a summer intensive course, which basically goes through a semester of Spanish every 2.5 weeks. I skipped part 1 since I took Spanish in the past, part 2 was the second elementary level, and part 3 which I'm doing now is intermediate), then going to my office to eat lunch, prep for class, have office hours, etc, then teaching 2:20-3:35 and then either walking or taking the bus home and getting back between 4:00 and 4:30. Then I do homework, grade papers, and maybe read or write. M moved in here last weekend, just temporarily, because his old lease ended before his new one began. It's going well.

I'm actually really loving my Spanish class and really wanting to go to Spain next summer. I also am enjoying my teaching assignment this summer, though the room is small and hot; the students are smart though and interested and mostly unjaded. I get to teach creative writing this fall. Definitely exciting, but I also need to plan a new course. If you have suggestions for readings or activities, let me know. Particularly in the realm of fiction because that is not my genre of choice. I'm more comfortable talking about poetry or nonfiction.

What have I read? I don't even remember. I read a lot during that third part of my summer: some memoirs, some poetry, some fiction. Outstanding things I remember reading were Audre Lorde's memoir "Zami: A New Spelling of My Name - A Biomythography" and the poetry collections "Late Psalm" by Betsy Sholl and "Bright Felon: Autobiography and Cities" by Kazim Ali.

So that is summer in a nutshell. Busy, mostly good, and going all too fast.